


If Dundee cake be the food of love

by Naraht



Category: Return to Night - Mary Renault
Genre: Aging, F/M, Post-Canon, Weight Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-05
Updated: 2014-04-05
Packaged: 2018-01-18 05:09:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1416271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Julian proves that it's possible to grow older without growing up, and Hilary is terribly shallow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If Dundee cake be the food of love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Selena](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selena/gifts).



"And now I'm thirty," said Julian, with what seemed to Hilary an indecent degree of satisfaction on the passage of another birthday.

He sank happily down into the armchair by the fire - _my armchair_ , thought Hilary mournfully - as though he had sat in it every night for the past six years. A spring under the worn upholstery protested at his weight with faint, rusty voice. Julian did not seem to hear.

"I haven't changed at all, have I?" he continued. "I told you I wouldn't. You remember. And now I've come home to you. We shan't ever be apart again."

"No, you haven't," said Hilary. She felt that she had answered a step too late in the conversation; more now demanded to be said, but she could not bring herself to say it.

She stood indecisively by the mantelpiece, telling herself that there was no sense in going to sit on the arm of Julian's chair. Her chair. The fire might need poking at any moment.

If he had changed at all, it was only superficially. He was still the same Julian that she had known in 1938: charming, inconsequential, immature, overwhelmingly preoccupied with his own concerns, deeply and terribly in need of affection. The passage of the years was written merely in the few, startlingly early strands of silver that now showed themselves in his jet black hair, in the fine lines that had begun to grave themselves almost imperceptibly into his skin. The contemplation of war from the safety of an RAF base in Canada had brought him no deeper wisdom than this, only perhaps a blind confidence in the enduring nature of her love.

"I ought to go and look up the Am Dram lot, now that I'm a gentleman of leisure again, do you know if they're still around?"

"I believe they put on _A Doll's House_ last year. But I didn't go; I was too busy with the E.M.S. hospital."

Julian nodded vaguely, his mind obviously elsewhere. Hilary thought of the stories she could tell, if only he cared to hear them. Her war had been a good one, so far as wars went. She was ready to have a good peace too. She felt she deserved it.

"Have you set aside a bit of Dundee cake for your birthday boy?" asked Julian.

He cast her a boyishly winsome look that would have been more charming if he had been twelve. Or even twenty-two. No doubt his mother would not have noticed the difference; Hilary did. She tested her own emotions and discerned no more than a faint boredom, as one might feel upon hearing a once-delightful joke that had been told too many times.

Her returning glance lighted upon his waistline. It had been several years since he could have boxed as a cruiserweight; he was now, she guessed, a good stone or so into the heavyweight category. 

Julian had not yet succeeded in entirely effacing his beauty. But she had the feeling that he would not be truly happy until he had done so.

She had considered that it was hypocritical of her to notice this and still more for her to mind. She was over forty herself, hardly in her first youth, and she had never expected to keep his interest for so long. But though her hair now kept its reddish tinge with the aid of henna, the meagre civilian rations of wartime had helped to ensure that could still flatteringly wear the trimly-fitting dark green dress that she had bought in London in 1939. She smoothed it down now, thoughtfully. As a part-time general surgeon at the E.M.S. hospital, she had been at first shocked, then annoyed, and finally touched by the pointed flirtation that she had inspired in patients half her age.

"I thought we might go for a walk first," she essayed.

"After the cake?" said Julian hopefully. "But I was thinking of taking Biscuit out."

"Don't you think that you're a little much for Biscuit to be carrying nowadays?"

Julian seemed taken aback. She had expected this to come out lightheartedly; it did not, and the moment she said it she realised that it had been intended to hurt. 

As soon as they married they had bought Biscuit back from Mr. Pascoe - at a significant loss - and Hilary, in Julian's absence, had ridden him throughout the war. Indeed, she had taken him out on a good few housecalls when the petrol ration, even for doctors, had been too minuscule to stretch any further. The horse was ageing now, like all of them. She would not now have ridden him hard herself; it was of this, she told herself belatedly, that she had mostly been thinking.

Nonetheless she did not think that Biscuit would appreciate being ridden by Julian, if only because she had personal reasons for identifying with his plight.

"Do you think so?" asked Julian, a frown furrowing his brow.

"No," she said soothingly, as she might speak to a favourite patient for whom nothing could be done. "No, not at all. Shall we have some cake? Perhaps then we can go and have a look at your ferrets."

A birthday was, after all, not an appropriate occasion to ask one's husband of six years for a divorce.

**Author's Note:**

> Perhaps this is not how it would turn out! Once again I blame Selena for everything:
> 
> http://naraht.dreamwidth.org/563677.html?thread=5970909#cmt5970909

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] If Dundee cake be the food of love](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2194977) by [Lilliburlero](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero), [Naraht](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht)
  * [Surfeiting the appetite](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4268097) by [Lilliburlero](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero)




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